A Queen’s Park author is inviting book-lovers to join him and TV star Maureen Lipman for an evening of readings from his new novel tomorrow.

Richard Phillips, who lives in Victoria Road, is launching his debut novel “A Polaroid of Peggy” this Thursday with a night of discussion, readings and reminiscences at Queen’s Park Books on Salusbury Road. The former advertising executive will be introducing his novel of “lost love and lost bearings” with the help of Oliver award-winning actress Ms Lipman who has been a firm friend since they worked together on a well-known BT advertising campaign in the nineties.

Mr Phillips says his first published novel, which was written in three months in a local branch of Starbucks, started off life as a film script and tells the story of a love affair in New York that will resonate with “anyone who has someone they look back on”.

He added: “It’s a story of what might have been, of what happens when you meet someone, you take a different path after a fork in the road and it falls apart but then you find something-like a Polaroid- that triggers the memory and it all comes flooding back.”

The author, who hopes his novelistic efforts will win him a place on Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs” said: “I absolutely loved writing the book, I knew what the end was going to be but the challenge was what went in between!”

Signed copies of the novel, published by Small & Greene, will be available throughout the evening which runs from 6.30pm- 8.30pm.

An 80-year-old grandmother was called a “f***ing bitch” in a “foul outburst” by her alleged murderer months before she was strangled with a lawnmower cord in a Colindale allotment shed, the Old Bailey heard today.